[mapserver-users] Re: FW: [Manifold] Map Server Docs

[Daniel Morissette]

Dimitri Rotow wrote:
> 
> Although this is a Manifold list and not a general GIS list, I hope people
> will forgive me for going "off topic" slightly and commenting on the
> Minnesota server.  It has pluses and minuses: the biggest pluses are that it
> is free and runs on Linux.  The biggest minuses are that is is complex to
> configure and operate, it is a low performance architecture and that it has
> numerous security holes, the most obvious of which is that it requires
> giving the Internet client "write" permission to the server's Internet
> directories.  These make it risky to deploy in production environments.
> 

Dimitri,

I agree with some of your points, but I strongly disagree on the "low
performance and numerous security holes"... you also forgot to mention
(in the pluses) reliability/stability and connectivity with other
systems via protocols such as OGC WMS (client and server), and
on-the-fly access to various data sources such as SDE, PostGIS, 20
raster formats and half a dozen vector formats.

I'm actually glad to hear that you have been able to combine easy
configuration and application development, flexibility, high performance
and affordable price into a single product... it's a huge step in the
right direction since none of the current map server offering could do
*all* of that until now AFAIK... not even MapServer which I have to
admit requires some skills and some time before you can take full
advantage of all its features.   This is not sarcasm... if what you
pretend is true then I'm impressed!  But I won't believe until I see
it... 

Does your note imply that Manifold IMS will deliver better performance
(and stability) than MapServer?  Other than the mythic belief that CGI
is slow, MapServer is actually the fastest fully featured web map server
I've seen until now... yes CGI overhead exists but it is minimal
compared to the time to render maps based on hundreds of Megabytes or
even Gigabytes of data (which MapServer can accomodate amazingly well
thanks to its high performance internal architecture!).

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see a Manifold-based website that can
beat Jean-Francois Doyon's Election application which served 80,000 maps
from a single Linux box on elections day last fall while sites based on
other webmapping servers all went down.  There is no cache trick here...
we're talking about real maps drawn and served.  Combine that with a
pool of servers with load balancing and the possibilities are unlimited
(and the price hard to beat!).

80,000 maps per day on a single server is acceptable performance to
me... if Manifold IMS beats that then I might even consider digging out
our old Manifold license and upgrading to see it by myself.

Best Regards,
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.